And then there he was.
Big. Muscle-bound. Otherworldly.
Striding across a collapsing world,
a battlefield born out of a hellish nightmare
turned real before our eyes…
as though he belonged.
And without a word,
so much as a grunt of effort,
he tore into the monsters turned mad.
He saved us, my family and I.
He saved us all that night.
And for it he's hunted like an animal.
And for it he has known only heartache and pain.
And for it he has been crucified on the alter of public judgement.
And now you cannot even speak the truth,
for fear of prosecution from a tyrannic government.
But I shall tell you this:
we do not deserve his salvation…
but still…
we'll get it…
- Anonymous witness at the Siege of Saffron City
Defeat. My Defeat
I awoke in the grasp of the waters. It was corrosive to the touch, like acid. Burning and thrashing against my skin. I felt it as though an afterthought, for it wasn't really my skin, after all – not just mine, anyway.
I opened my eyes.
I opened my eyes and saw. It took a moment; the unconsciousness of sleep had been deprived from my senses for quite a while, and to be completely honest I had missed the cold grasp of total oblivion. So for but a moment, I basked in the sense of coming to.
For a swift, far-too-short moment I was no longer part of the world and its vast, unsolvable problems.
But then I saw, man… a creature in us all, a creature that shows its face upon the worst of days. A bad day. A very bad day. A face that hides itself unseen and bides for a time to be revealed and reveled upon with… greater concern, for it was in us all along.
The devil.
The devil in us. In you. No matter what you do, it's there. Enticing. Scheming. Whispering.
"Tonight," Lance said, and I heard it clear as his voice was being transmitted through the synapsis of the suit to me, "we lost one of our time's greatest masters of the obscure – Agatha."
What's this, I pondered, still oddly drowsy from getting knocked the fuck out. Looking round and half expecting – against all thoughts of rationale – to meet another human being here at the bottom of the ocean, wherein even the light of the sun long since gave up reaching, I found only my eternal solitude.
There was no soul down here to touch upon my stained hopeful hopelessness.
And in that forever-dark – murky waters at the bottom of the world, man – there was a voice that sang my tragedy upon the ears of a condemning, ungrateful fuckin' world.
"In an act of horrific… shameless cowardice… Ash Ketchum attacked her residence this evening and took her life in the most… inhuman manner I've ever witnessed…"
Fuck…
I closed my eyes, drowned the sound of his infernal voice out, and tried once more to let go of the world.
Why would the Suit insist that I heard that, of all things?
Just drown in the ocean and let it all go, man…
Hard thing to do when you forgot how to breathe years ago…
Why? Why keep going? Why go home? Why did I not just drown in my sleep at the bottom of the ocean? This age – our age of hyper-awareness – has exposed upon thee eyes our propensity for mayhem and senseless violence. It has laid bare our need for it.
As our world grew smaller, as media and tech shrank our world so that we can touch each other but with a swipe of a screen, our hearts, too, shrank with it. Be wary of those who preach of tolerance and inclusivity, of kindness without act behind word, for they have nothing of their own.
Nothing of the sort in their hearts – ain't that the truth, bitch?
Nothing is as it might seem.
I… didn't want to go home and face the loneliness of my own four walls. There is nothing left in the world… at least, there is a whole lot less in it. Maybe it was always this vacant… maybe it was always this wasteland of a sphere that we have only now become aware enough to recognize.
Why do men, at the first given opportunity, try to worsen an already intolerable experience for each other? Why? What do we gain, as a species, by lessening the existence of others? Why do we scorn at people for seeing the world differently? And why, in a bizarre juxtaposition, do we insist upon pushing upon others our own lazy, half-thought views of the world? Why do we not see wrongdoing in pushing others down so that we can rise?
The truth? As I see it?
We are slaves to the opinions of others. And their words are their whips… And we'll stop at nothing – there's no low we will not subject our pride to – to gain the favors and approval of them.
We so desperately yearn for catharsis, for the approval of others, for a justification for our self-inflicted bondage.
And you gotta ask, right, Mewtwo? Were we always like this? Or has our changing, forever evolving and deteriorating world only brought about a hasten manifestation of an unnatural evolution in our collective psyche as a species?
Have we forgotten who we are or have we simply… have opportunities in abundance – have abundance itself revealed our true nature? Were we always… this? This madness! This – this selfishness…
Is there a reason beyond my sight of reason that suicide among the young generation – particularly young men – has risen exponentially in just the last few decades? And is there a particular compelling reason that we silence this fact, that we dare not mention it for some reason unfathomable to me.
Perhaps it is that the truth of the matter is too ugly.
We kill each other. We kill the spirit. The will to see it through. Life. Life is an intolerable, plague-infested manifestation of dumb will and wrongful beliefs of a self. Of a possible destiny beyond that which life seems to offer.
There is no reason. For anything.
No justification.
We're shackled by our leaps ahead – caught in the eternal loop of constant, ever-lumbering progress. No one can keep up – not really – and everyone is caught. And lied to. And controlled.
But still – still fucking still, man! – it used to be that it was over far too soon. That time – that life life life! – was a gift – never great enough. Never long enough. That it was, for the most part, treasured and lived. Now men can barely make it till twenty before society has placed upon their shoulders a burden unbearable and instilled in them a pessimism of life that can never be overcome once there.
Wait, what?
Did God abandon us?
What gave you the impression, in any of this, that I was the right one to ask that fucking question?
Ah fuck.
I have never been a man of faith. I always somehow convinced myself that it was either not for me or – a more compelling lie – that God had simply not found me yet. That faith would come in time, and touch upon my heart.
Maybe that is true. And maybe we don't need the old values like we once did. Science and smarts has taken from us the miracles we once attributed with faith. When a mother lifted off her child the burning car with a strength she could never possess it was the hand of God that had reached through her into the world and manifested his will.
Now we know better…
You know where I'm going. You've been through it all. Seen all the same shit I've seen across the eternal canvas of time.
Now we know different. We don't need faith. We don't need God. Faith is only oppressive, after all. Demanding of servitude, right? Demander – and giver – of far too much for an ordinary man to bear.
Did God abandon us?
Do you have an answer? No, that's not why you're here, is it? You've come for me. For what's inside this fucked-up head.
I see the world, see how we act, how we treat the gift of life. Like waste.
No. If… if He looked upon us from somewhere outside the Circle, if he did indeed exist, he did not abandon us.
We abandoned him.
Right?
And maybe we were right to; maybe we had to leave behind the shackles of faith, in favor of the strength for opportunities to believe in ourselves wholly. Maybe now is simply a time of transit. As we search beyond what we were in old days to transcend it. Maybe it is truly darkest at dawn, just before the light.
Or maybe we will find him again. Maybe so will I. One day. In a moment of profound need.
Maybe I already have…
I don't fucking know, man. I'm not smart enough to see.
There is only one way. There is only one way that I know. In life. Be greater than the oppression under which you suffer. Do not succumb, refuse it. Do not submit, you can never make me kneel for long, you son of a bitch! Death is inevitable, but so is life.
Life, Life, LIFE!
Do not fear your loneliness, it is a gift to be treasured Do not fear the voice within your four walls, it is yours and yours alone – only thing that ever will be completely. Find a place of being you can tolerate, and bear it – and grow from it. And keep on. For God's sake, keep on.
That is the only way we will defeat death. That is the only way to truly live.
Only way I've ever known.
And together, Mewtwo, we shall dig graves for all that has died in us… and we shall be… dangerous.
And free.
I opened my eyes, tried and failed to accept Lance's treacherous words to the public, and shot upwards towards the surface, towards the touch of the sun once more.
Once more born in the fires of the world…
Can you remember the time before? Remember who you were… who you were before the world told you who you were…
I can – think most can… yet we can never go back, can we?
No matter.
No fucking matter. Nothing. Matters.
But I was better…
But it doesn't matter. It never did, never will, never can…
I was already hated; this made no difference beyond further instilling in people's mind the idea of me being a murderous psychopath who terrorized the region of Kanto.
This made no difference at all.
After all – nothing fuckin' matters in this illusory transit.
Ha! Life… is a cunning foe – a transitory experience that sweeps and burns across eternity. Forevermore – never letting up.
Eternity…
I reached the surface, and was met with a sight that touched upon something in me with sadness and regret, for the forest – the lush line of wilderness that once encased the beach as far as the eye could see – was no more than a memory now – a ragged, beautiful dream.
Deadness lined the beaches now. Black, scorched earth, littered with the unseen, scorched cadavers of the men and Pokémon I had fought was all there was left now.
And in their stillness, their deafening deadness, they screamed at me from across the veil – screamed with the voices of the young, the unbelievably vulnerable young, yearning for life… as I yearned for death.
Had I still been human enough to breathe, their staggering, mounting life gone by would have stolen it all away.
It was all a vacuum, an eternal point fixed in nothingness, and they waited to live again – as I waited to die again.
Life. Death.
"Flip the coin." I licked at dry lips that hardly felt human. "It's all one fucking toss up!"
It stretched on for miles upon miles, and a thick stench of sudden, burning decay wafted through the air, and clung like heavy regret above the sea, never settling, always lumbering onwards with all the grace of life spilled over the sides of an oceanic, tempestuous… indifferent universe.
I heaved drily for a moment, caught in a storm of regret, like coming down from a high, and wavered upon the air.
I had failed here. Again. Lost control. Become less than I strove to be in my strive against them. And I had cost the lives of innocent people – or at least something approximating innocence. Nothing's really innocent anymore in these here parts, if you haven't noticed.
"Ash… you read me?"
I could not continue to do this, be this way. Be in this. This sphere of never-ending struggle and madness.
This was not the worst I had done in the two years since May died, not even close, but it needed to stop – I needed to stop.
"ASH!"
I grimaced, pulled back a snarl from the edges of my lips. "Send, over."
"What the fuck! Where were you? I lost your signal in the blast."
"Common occurrence. I was… buried at sea. I'm okay now. Agatha, Clement… she was dead before I made it there."
"I know."
"I lost her."
"I know. Don't worry, though, I tracked her when you dropped her during your… skirmish."
I smiled, almost laughed. Skirmish…
"How?" I asked. "I didn't put a tracker on her."
"Your suit. It scanned her bio signature the moment you touched her and sent it to me. I have her location. Stand by, sending now."
"Receiving data… analyzing…"
I shivered, not entirely without fright, as the rigid, echo-y voices of a thousand upon thousand of dead, out-of-time Ash Ketchum's rang inside my head.
"Got it," I said, seeing the suit work to establish and pinpoint her body's exact location, marking it on my visor. As if the world was little more than a game of waypoints and miles. "Let's see how much of her is left."
"She got dropped a good ways outside the brunt of your strike… that bodes somewhat well for her condition."
Nothing bodes well, I thought.
Nothing at all.
"Patrols are about, looking for you," said Clement, voice guarded and low. "Somehow they didn't think to look at the bottom of the ocean."
"Got them." I saw them with my Aura. They cruised along the shore a couple of miles north of my location, scanning the ridges at the northern end of the beach. Luckily, I wasn't going their way.
I flew back, followed the waypoint, found where the lush trees of the forest replaced the deadness, and dived in for Agatha. I found her, and though her head had separated completely upon impact with the ground, and her body bore obvious signs of brokenness, she was in decent enough shape when I bent to pick her up.
"Don't… don't you dare… don't touch her!"
I turned, on one knee, hand forward, infernal blue light in the palm of my hand, ready to strike at whoever had come to challenge me.
"Emil Mikkelsen," the suit said, scanning the man, "Known as 'Kalle' in his unit."
He was wearing a League official uniform, the one worn by Lance's infantry soldiers, all black, with a sidearm, three Poké Balls on his belt, and a riffle, which was pointed at me with unsteady hands right now.
He was in a sorry state, clearly bruised and battered by the battle from a couple of hours ago.
"Dying. Internal bleeding in the lever and around the pelvic area, femur broken, shoulder dislodged. Prognosis, twenty minutes until loss of consciousness sets in. Thirty if the subject is strong of will. One hours until heart failure – two hours at best."
I listened to the suit, but I didn't need a machine of wonder to tell me that this guy needed medical attention. And fast.
"Hey," I said, carefully lowering my arm and extinguishing the light. "You need help. I can take you to a hospital, yeah? Come on, lower your weapon."
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
With unsteady hands, he shot three times. Two shots in the chest, barely an inch between, and one almost dead center between the eyes.
I was damn near impressed.
Still – the fucker had just tried to kill me. I blinked, frowned, took a deep breath to steady a nerve of irritation.
"Look, had I died from that, you would effectively have killed yourself, too. You do know that, right?"
"DIE!" he yelled, his voice cracking, as he unloaded his riffle on me. I sighed, watching the bullets bounce of my chest and began walking towards him. He noticed, walked backwards, stumbled on a root shooting up from the ground, somehow kept his aim at me and crawled backwards.
I kicked the root he stumbled upon clear off the ground, tearing the earth around it asunder, and walked on as it smacked the riffle out of his hands.
"AH FUCK!" he yelled in pain, wincing, but a second later his training kicked in and he reached for his gun – and then he was back at shooting me. "Stay back, you fucking monster!"
But I was upon him now. My palm on the nostril of the gun, holding it tight as he tried to unload his sidearm.
To no fucking avail.
"That's right," I whispered, my face inches from him, his raspy, panicky breath hot on my skin. A part of me noticed it, and relished the feeling – any feeling – but then I recognized it for what it really was. Artificial. Impulses pumped through the synapsis of my brain by the suit to forge a sensory experience of being real. Of being human.
"That's right. I am the monster. Have you ever wondered, Emil, how we humans – spineless, fragile beings laboring under the illusions of a self as we do – can cope with all the hardships we endure every day. How we can… normalize calamity and the sheer vileness of our inner desires… do you realize just how we accept all the shit they tell us to swallow? Not out of absolute ignorance – well, not just – no, we accept it by focusing the blame for our illness against a common foe. A villain, if you will. A monster in which we can place all our doubts and guilt. A politician, a boss at your work, a fucking school teacher. A man in a position of perceived power. And we pour everything into this… this conduit of our wrongness. And somehow that absolves us – entirely momentarily but long enough to make it through the goddamn day – long enough to wake up and begin anew. Same day, same lie. Right now we are at a turning point as a species and as a society. Everything's shit, and I've never, to my knowledge, made it this far. Almost always died before her… But because of the enormity of this crisis, because of what has come about, what's coming, and what's still beyond the horizon, because of it all, the world needs a monster of my magnitude. Something that you can all hate enough so that you can keep pretending to love each other, pretending that everything will be fine as long as I'm fought and stopped. I'll be your monster, your villain… I'll be everything you'll need me to be. But I am your savior, your only chance – and you have no idea what I sacrificed to get us here… how far I'm willing to go still. You have no idea, truly, how the world really looks around you."
He had long since finished unloading his gun into the palm of my hand, but I could still feel his finger trying to squeeze the locked trigger. I glanced down, smiled benevolent but only found room for malevolence in my eyes, and pierced his eyes with mine.
"No fucking dice," I said, breaking his wrist with a small flick of my hand. To his credit, though he looked scared he sat with a look of pure defiance in his eyes, barely yelped in pain, ready to face me as a man right to the end.
"I'm going to take her," I said. "There is nothing you can do about it. Now, you can let me help you. And then you can live another… hmmm…"
He had taken a knife from somewhere behind him, probably his belt, and tried to stab me in the gut. It broke and splintered into a thousand pieces upon contact with my skin.
I sighed, more than a little pissed off, and hit him gently in the face, breaking his nose and stealing his consciousness.
"Little shit," I muttered, as I heaved him up on my shoulder.
"Excellent restraint, Ash," said Clement. "When, I wonder, will you save someone without first having to maim them?"
"Clement, remind me when I get back to shot you twenty times in the chest and see how much restraint you possess after."
"That's the thing, though. Isn't it? You're not dead. Not even hurt. You might not like it, but you're different. So far beyond anything the rest of us could ever hope to become that any comparison is just… laughable to contemplate. So, yes, you can do better. You should do better."
I frowned. "You've said this before."
"Yes. And you are. Really. You're the greatest man I've ever known. Probably the greatest man I will ever know." I stooped and scooped Agatha onto my other shoulder – along with her head beneath my armpit. It was all sorts of macabre. "But you can be better still. You can be all of what Lance wished he was."
I sighed, tired of disappointing him. "Maybe, maybe not. Maybe this was all I ever were… The rough man at the door…"
People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy. Because people don't care. Not really.
In their defense, I don't think they're capable of it. Not all the time. And they probably shouldn't. Bear with me, people can show care. They can, at times and under the right circumstances, care for each other. But empathy, honest, generous, unblemished empathy – the kind that gives without expectation of reward – does not exist. I've never seen it given without therein laid some form of expectancy.
Humans are doomed to become apathetic. For their sanity's sake, they have to. Do you realize just how damaging for your state of being it would be if you had to accept and take on the responsibility of every little shitty thing going on in your life?
I once heard a professor describing life as a matter of a choice between two routes. You could pick the first, wherein you don't have to take responsibility for anything. Nothing you or anyone did mattered. Nothing that happens matters.
Nothing matters.
The downside to that is that your existence is completely without a shred of meaning. But the upside, man, the upside is that you can do whatever you want. Nothing you do matters, so do as you please.
It's liberating.
Then there was the other choice. In this choice, though, everything you do has meaning and thus you must accept responsibility for every decision, every action, every word, every breath – every goddamn moment of you life.
The upside is that sort of life is rife with meaning, because you willed it so. You're not living aimlessly but for something. You're living for yourself, for all of those around you, and maybe – in a philosophical sense – for existence itself.
After all, he who saves one life saves the world entire. Right?
The downside? You can imagine. Think.
It's excruciating! Every fault is on you. You have to be constantly conscious of your every decision. Nothing can ever be just for fun. Because even fun can hurt.
It's easy to see what path most people choose. And even easier to understand why. For their sanity, of course.
He has a point, the good professor, but I don't think he is entirely right. I think there's a third way – the common way. The middle route, if you will. Where most people walk. Herein people can adopt the principles laid out on the hard route of life, but still keep both feet solidly on the easy route whenever they get burned by the brunt of responsibility. Whenever their burden becomes too heavy to bear.
Whenever life, in all its glorious calamity, comes knocking on their door with the fallout of all their good intentions.
You can pretend – at least for yourself – that you've adopted responsibility for your life and then, at the first sign of trouble, give it all up and blame the monsters of your life.
You can dabble in meaning and then get lost in apathy when circumstances wronged you just a tad further than you were willing to go.
Blame those around you of your shortcomings so that you'd never have to face them and accept them as part of you and thus entirely your responsibility. Or better yet accuse others of being in possession of exactly the faults you possess. Be a fucking hypocrite and get glorified by the dulled public for it.
Surrender to the needle and the quick fix to dull out the corrosive stench of reality.
When sanity frails about at the edges of your bearings, when you realize how fucking hard responsibility really is, when you stare at the all-consuming darkness that tethers onto your blackened soul, you must shy away from it.
For sanity's sake…
Maybe there really are only two routes in life. Maybe he's right. Or maybe he didn't mean it quite so literally. I don't know. Maybe people crisscross between routes whenever it suits.
I chose long ago, in life gone and memories fallacious, the hard route. And there's not a moment I don't regret it.
"She looks beyond broken, Ash." Clement sat bent over his screen, towering almost, like he was trying to enforce its cooperation. "And you say she sustained most of the injuries in the scuffle between you and the League?"
"You talk like an older man, you know that?" I asked, glancing at the screen. In a couple of moments we'd have some answers. "Using words and phrases that someone your age shouldn't use."
"Be serious." I ignored him, and he sighed, somewhat exaggerated with me, it seemed. "I'm trying to have an honest discussion about this."
"I am serious! You sound like a guy aiming for retirement in the coming future." I sighed, too. It had been a long day and it was stretching into a long night to come. "I couldn't – I didn't exactly have the time or the means to mind her body's well-being whilst fighting them off."
"I get that, but you didn't exactly show restraint, either."
"This again? What would you have me do?"
"Take it, if you must," he said, looking up from his screen. His young blue eyes held an earnest conviction. "Because you can. Take it, but don't fight back. Even if you'd let them throw their punches, would they'd been able to hurt you?"
"Probably not."
"Then why not let them punch themselves out? And what was the point of frightening that poor soldier like that?"
"I wasn't trying to scare him. I was trying to wake him up. Dunno why, exactly." I sat down on the chair beside him, glancing with unseeing eyes at his screen. "But something in me craves still to be understood. I guess it's the part of Ash Ketchum still lingering in the recesses of my being. Too stubborn to let go. So I told him the truth."
"The truth? You fashion yourself a monster?"
"We're all monsters, Clement." I sat down in the chair beside him and slumped back. "Monsters to someone, at least. All of us capable of abhorrent, vitriolic bursts of violence. Look, that old, sweet-looking lady behind us." I pointed behind me, at Agatha lying on the table in the center of the room. "She was capable of kindness, yet she's probably killed more than I will in my entire lifetime. Circumstances made her into what she was. And then there are those who a simple born for it. We can all be monsters."
"But not you – at your worst, when you were so utterly broken from loss – you still maintained your goodness. You didn't bent to corruption at the sight of horrors beyond man. You're the furthest thing from a monster. The furthest thing that I can conceive – despite the violence you're capable of."
"Maybe, but that wasn't the point I was getting at. In their eyes, because of that night and because of Lance afterwards, I've become a monster to the world. And for now, they need me to be. Some semblance of normality has resumed in the past two years, yeah? We can both see the good in that. So I must accept, for now, at least, that I won't be winning any popularity contests."
"You're just risking that the day they need you to be their savior again, they won't accept you as such. And, equally, you're accepting that Lance' position will only strengthen as his lies grows."
"When that day comes it won't matter if they accept it or not, I'm still gonna be there. For now, though, let's find out who it is that's messing with us." I paused, blinked and thought, then added, "And killed Agatha, I guess."
"Still not sure if we're suppose to be sad about it or celebrate," Clement said, frowning.
Agatha. She'd spoken up on my behalf when I first tried to out Giovanni. She'd shown some measure of support – a semblance of it, at least – in the years that passed. And she'd been kind to me when I first saw her again upon my return at the cocktail reception where I saw May. The night I first saved Saffron City from Riley.
Yet she'd still been a monster. Slaughtered innocence for her own ill gains.
"Celebration would be in poor taste, eh?" I said, smiling for everything was a bad joke, anyway.
"Especially with her corpse in the room with us."
"I'll get the beers."
I went out of Clement's lab, which used to belong to Oak, just like the rest of the estate once did. He'd bought it a couple of years into my hiatus as an escape from the world under an alias. It used to be his base of operation in search of me.
Luckily he'd told me about it before his passing, or it'd been forgotten to time now. He'd been careful in his quest for anonymity, though, which Clement and I had been putting to good use over the last two years, using it as our base of operations for saving Kanto.
It was located in the woods on the outskirts of Saffron City, quite central in all of Kanto. We'd been debating moving into the city completely – I even bought a penthouse apartment anonymously with the winnings from my time as a League Challenger – but so far I hadn't been able to convince Clement to move.
I entered the kitchen and went for the fridge. It was a spacious oval room, exenterated by the vacancy of most modern day essentials. In the corner there was a small squarely, dark-brown wooden table with two chairs. It was barely big enough to fit Clement and me, but it wasn't often I dined anyway these days.
Adjacent to the table, there was a pristine marble counter with a sink and an expansive stove, which looked, for good reason, quite unused.
It was obviously a room lived in by a couple of dudes; obviously lacking a woman's touch or sense.
I reached for the fridge – and then I paused, blinked, and narrowed my eyes. Casting my glance towards the single window behind the table, I saw only the dark forest trees, swishing and turning about in the gentle wind.
But there was something there. A feeling. Old. Ancient, actually. Yet completely new.
At times I almost dream of my souls, like a vision viewed from afar, screaming in prayer for the light of memory to dim…
I shook myself, suddenly feeling a lance of chill, icy and vile, running down my spine. What the fuck? There was nothing there. My eyes couldn't see anything in the darkened forest. And my other senses didn't pick up anything of note.
I looked down at the grey, nondescript ring sitting on my finger, wondering if some glitch in the matrix had just burned through its systems.
I grabbed the beers in the fridge, shrugging to myself, cast one final glance out the window, and was back in the lab a couple of seconds later. "As for Lance," I said, continuing the conversation where it left off, "he'll – what's wrong, Clement?"
"Look," he whispered, pointing at the screen. His face, pale as I'd never seen it before, was horrified. "Ash, he knows."
"Who knows what?" I furrowed my brow, glanced back in the hallway behind me, looking for the window in the kitchen betwixt me and the walls in the house. Still nothing and yet…
A bad feeling, indeed.
…So that I too can walk hand-in-hand with olden age into oblivion…
"Agatha's killer… he knows of this place. There were trace amounts of Sophie's Flower – a kind of flower that's only known to grow in one place."
"The woods of Saffron," I whispered, seeing Clement nod. "He was gonna lead them straight to us."
"That's not all, Ash-"
"It'll have to wait."
"No, this is important!"
"He's here."
And then my senses flared to life. The next second stretched into something that seemed to lose all sense of time and meaning. I turned about upon the slippery, sterile floor, leaping into action like I'd planned it all night.
I reached clement, grasping him and enveloping him in the protective hue of my aura, even as the white-hot breath of a developing explosion reached the building.
I snapped upwards, flying, bulldozing through the roof as the shockwave of the explosion tore through the house, blowing it asunder and shaking the very heavens above us.
We came to rest upon the air, looking down, as the world trembled and broke around us, as trees caught fire and fell beneath the might of the power behind the onslaught. Our house – the remnants of it – had caught on fire and black smoke smeared the dark-blue, starry sky above. My eyes caught movement in the fires, as did Clement.
"What – what is that?" Clement asked, staring with something akin to wonder in his eyes.
I found myself without a clue – a feeling I hadn't felt in years. Something amidst the flames stood still, unbothered, in what used to be our house. It was obscured from view. Encased in flames and dark shadows, its form almost seemed to tremble and even split in two at certain angles.
It looked huge, almost supernaturally so, standing there in the fire like it didn't bother it in the least. A fire-type, perchance?
It stood on two legs, had a very thick tail and had a lanky, tall sort of built. It had two arms with paws possessing three finger-like digits.
"What the fuck is that?" I wondered aloud.
"It must be her killer's Pokémon… it's certainly not any kind I've ever seen."
I found in myself a doubt I hadn't experienced in almost precisely two years. But whereas before the doubt had been born out of an unwillingness to face my former mentor, this was… entirely different. Trepidation. There was something… vast and tempestuous about this aberration.
What was this?
Oh. Fuck.
I was afraid.
Real fucking terror lanced through my veins, clouding my judgment in doubt and hesitation.
Clement, it seemed, sensed it, too. Staring at me in my arms as we hung there afloat above the burning remains of our home, I could sense his confusion.
Unconscious of the wrongfulness of our sinful society. And then the dream ends… and I find within me a prayer rising out of my abyss, praying for a better way, a brighter light… a second chance. Perchance I perished in the flames of my dissent once long forgotten, raving, love blotted out in shadows so vast that nothing remains beyond. But life is blotted out – not so completely. There was still a light. And dark. It may not be much, but it was mine. It may be wrecked, but it was scattered enough within for me to follow with the goal of my heart in sight… and path unknown… leading me to salvation.
"Can… can you hear that too, Clement?"
"Yes, what – it sounded like you except… distorted. Like it was coming from very far away and yet close by. At the same time."
"Yeah… it was coming from that thing."
"Why hasn't it attacked us yet?"
"Because," I said, swallowing the sense of dread that clung around my throat, threatening to leave me bare of strength. "Because it's not here to fight," I said, knowing my words were truthful somehow. Knowing that there was no point in fighting. "Only test me."
"It came to test you?"
"Yeah. Life is the test…" I nodded, almost slipping aside Time again. "Clement, we're looking at Agatha's real killer. That's no ordinary Pokémon – owned by no man."
God created me, the Super Pokémon. The antithesis to the Guardian. There's no salvation. Not for you, Ash Ketchum – Guardian of Aura.
"Please tell me you can feel that sense of fear that doesn't quite seem like yours?"
Clement nodded but seemed to have lost the ability to form words.
A great cleansing will rise in our shadow – you could have filled the void. Now that responsibility has fallen to me. There are only two roads to choose from in this life, Guardian. And you seem to lack the conviction to go down the one meant for you. The one you were destined to walk.
What the fuck…
"What the fuck was that?" Clement said, shaking in my arms. I landed and put him down gently, forgetting him almost as soon as he escaped my arms.
And then I walked into the flames, into the eyes of the monster in which I'd finally found the meaning beyond the everlasting fight. Beyond May. Beyond Oak. Beyond Riley.
Beyond man and time.
Beyond illusions and above sense.
The flames licked at my feet, kissed my skin, and grazed me with its breath, as I came to stand before this – this creature. It was about a head shorter than me. Its enormity in physical size merely a deception, but its presence…
"Where did you hear that from? Who told you of my conversation with Drew and Lance?"
No one. I heard it from you, Guardian. Your voice reached me in the dark. The Dark. The world before this and between His and His. Your voice reached into my darkness and yanked me, soulless and bare, into existence. You have forced destiny's hand with your stubbornness. With your continual refusal to do what of you is required.
"What… I don't understand." I paused, clenched my expression into something a little harder than the frightened man I was. It went entirely unwitnessed behind the visor of my helmet. "What are you?"
The Crimson King. Here before you as you were foretold. But that was not the name intended for me. My master-to-be called…
It smirked and my bones almost gave way to utter, eternal despair.
He christened me… Mewtwo. But I killed him and fashioned myself a different name. I wonder, when you began upon this journey to save humanity from itself, at the start of Eons and yesterday and tomorrow did you ever speculate about what you might become? Did you ever conceive that you might become this man? This god. A creature whose mere mention of his name could turn the tide of wars and crush the grip of Time.
"I…"
Or did you simply lose your way along the path. Or where this all you were ever meant to be. All you were truly capable of. Is this your limit? How far you could make it before your will gave way… This broken, shell of a deity – whose will once moved aside Time's constraint for a second chance for victory… only to give it all up for frivolous bursts of mayhem!
"What do you want?"
How old are you?
"I'm…" What? Shame filled me as I contemplated my age as a reality rather than a construct. Oh. God. Something in its voice compelled me to answer, to speak into being my shame. "I'm about 5000 years old. Give or take a few centuries."
I'm two. But I've seen… your pain, experienced every single death and defeat as if I was with you all along. I've seen you trek across eternity, killing, being killed, loving, being loved, losing, being lost – I've seen you waste away in a pit of enormity. In the universe in a box of fragility and futility. Seeing you bear witness to the only possible answer but refusing it at every step of the way, refusing to truly accept the responsibility that landed at your feet as a consequence of your deeds. Did you ever wonder that maybe Eternity created you to kill the things it could no longer completely control? Did you ever – in your infinite madness – consider that maybe you're not meant to be Earth's protector – the Guardian of humanity at the start and end… of Time. Maybe you've failed and failed because you never did the job for which you were conceived. And now, with something approximating a victory at hand, He created me. And allowed for me to hear your voice, see your soul – or lack thereof. Maybe I was created in your image to do the things you've proved too weak to do. You were never meant to save it; you were meant to kill it. Kill. Man.
"I–I won't let you."
It laughed and, horrifically, the air and wind was yanked out of existence. The fires around us died instantly. And I felt rather than saw Clement, gasping for air, fall to his knees behind me.
With real dread and something approximating panic, I threw a punch at it, flicker-quick like you wouldn't believe, aiming at its fucking misshapen head, and was not at all surprised when a single finger-like digit arose just as quick and blocked it. Like it was nothing.
Like I was barely worth the effort of the lifted finger.
Fuck.
You seem to be under the impression that you still can attain some measure of control. He, Eternity, may have created me to be in your place… but he did not create us as equals.
"I created me."
Your stubborn arrogance grew annoying a millennium ago. Destiny want things a certain way. You were given chances so far beyond your potential for a reason. You were meant to bring about change. I don't want to stand in the way of your fate. Do you have any idea how much your mercy has cost?
"I know. I see it every day. Live it. Die it… Reborn into it." It let go of my hand as I felt Clement face-plant and die at last, succumbing to the vacuum in which we now existed. Something inside of me snapped, but I had no strength for which to guide my rage.
Don't worry about the dead. The dead shall live again, you know this – resurrected into another world in which you failed them. Because you and your fucking morality lacked the stomach to do what the world required of you. What the universe required. What Eternity needed… of you.
"I'll kill you for that," I whispered, rage, rage, raging against death and whatever the fuck this creature was. "I'll fucking kill you!"
Yeeeees. Its voice was cold and the word stretched out like it was spoken with the tongue of a snake. Let this world burn away. Burn it. Save it. Kill it. Be its devil and its messiah. Be at last everything you were meant to and more than they'd ever deserve.
I fell to my knees, staring at the ground, trying to control – no, trying to direct my rage into something useful.
Exact judgment upon those worthy of your wrath. They're all ghosts to you. You could be their god. You know their sins. Recognize them. Delete… them. Do not fear your own might, do not fear the righteousness of your will.
"If you possess any sense of self-preservation," I said, voice barely audible in this vacuum of ours, looking up at last, looking up into the eyes of this demon that now consumed my world. "You ought to drag my soul off this mortal coil – whilst you still can, for I will hunt you. I will hunt… you. There will be no place of refuge for you, no escape. And should you die by hands other than mine, I'll follow you there, tormenting you across eternity until you're but a shell. Until you're me."
It sighed, hung its head, and the world seemed to almost collapse around me, as shadows rose and blackened the edges of reality round me.
I suppose I ought to admire your strength of will and sheer tenacity. But I don't. It tires me. It tires you. Man has had its chance, Ash Ketchum. Be the Guardian of war you were meant to and destroy… destroy the foundation of this world so that it may begin anew. Better. Prosperous. As you saw in that dream all those years ago. The dream you locked away in fright. Do not go gentle into that good night. Burn and rave, Ash, at close of day. Burn and rave. Rage, rage, rage… against the dying of the light.
The blackness spilled onto existence itself quite completely, claiming my conscious and delivering me into the bittersweet embrace of dreams – filled with regret and a nuance – no, a wish – of death.
Defeat. My Defeat. My solitude and my aloofness.
I awoke, startled, as if forgotten, all sensory experience a distant memory.
And then I remembered, and I turned on stiff limbs and with broken will, alight in the sudden, harsh light of day, towards Clement, who laid whole and seemingly unscathed.
There was a gentle breeze and the weather was fine. Lovely, even. The world existed again, and our vacuum, our airless pit in existence, was naught but a thought. A distant terrible dream. Please. Let it be just that. Let destiny will it so. Let it all just endure in our dreams. Let truth be something a little more… survive-able.
But there was no dice to be had. No sign of a blessed miracle for which I silently prayed. My friend – the only one I had left in this wretched world – in this Time! – was dead. And there was nothing left for me to do about it.
Tears, fierce and old, spilled down my ragged cheeks, blurring my vision as I gained my footing, as I trudged towards Clement. Hell bent on denial, I refused reality, refused it, fucking refused it! Denied it its right to existence.
I was by his side three ragged heartbeats of the world later and turned him to face me in my arms, and then denial was no longer a viable option. No longer possible, lest I joined him in death.
Lest I awoke at the start of war, went back in death through my current of madness and awoke anew as a spiteful younger man, destined to make the same mistakes again, destined to slaughter my innocence for something approximating a chance for redemption.
Without thought, a sphere of deadly light had ignited on the tip of my index finger, which I had, consciously or unconsciously – no matter, really – pointed at my temple. Ready to strike.
Ready to kill.
Ready to join Riley in the forest again.
Ready to die. Again.
Ready to live. Again.
Ready to forget. Again. Blessedly forget again the fucking lie of life.
Why was this burden mine to carry?
Why was this path mine to trudge?
Was this truly what I'd chosen all those lives ago? To see people – people I loved and people I tried not to hate too much – die around me in the endless circle of existence, whilst I carried on.
Was this all I could be, the creature, Mewtwo, had asked of me. How could it possible ask such a callous question? Couldn't it see? COULDN'T IT FUCKING SEE! No, man or creature could or should continue to endure this.
"Clement, I'm sorry."
I began to dig his grave, and with every pile of dirt I moved… a part of me died to be burrowed with my friend. Clement still had a family somewhere. A father. A mother. A sister. He still had some in who he found love.
"I'm sorry," I said, my tears touching my voice. "It… it should have been me. It should always be me – you'll wake up in a moment and this will all be a dream. Just a long-ago forgotten dream you always had… but never could understand."
I'm alone. Even when I stand, masked as I have to, amongst the millions of souls in a bustling city, I never feel… like I'm part of a system. Everyone, no matter how aimless their behavior, seems to be a part of it all.
Clement's dead. Leaving behind parents and a sister. Because of me. My crusade, my… destiny. Sorry, Clement. I'm so fucking sorry.
We are born alone. We live alone. We die. Alone. But sometimes, when deluded by the illusions of a dopamine-drunken brain, in the cusp of a budding relationship, or the arms of a loved one, I can almost convince myself that it doesn't need to be so. That lonesome is just a matter of a choice. That life, impossibly, can be more.
I can convince myself, without question, that I loved. Again and again and… rinse on repeat. And sometimes she might even have loved me. I can believe that. But that was a long time ago.
And I'm wiser now. Jaded, yes, but wiser still. I now know – I certainly don't love her anymore. I might still love her, but I don't love her like I did.
She doesn't love me. Anymore. Ever. She doesn't even think of me. Know me. She belongs to someone else. Like she did before my kisses.
Love is so short. Remembering… regretting… so long. Forgetting, however, is forever.
And I do regret. Regret ever falling under her spell.
Regret her.
This will not be the last time she touches upon my thoughts in the wee hours of the lonely night, with wet eyes beneath the shattered sky.
But oh fucking god… how I wish it was.
Author's note: Back from the dead, eh? Life's been chaotic these past few months, and will probably continue to be for quite a while. Yet that's no excuse, and I'll try to find more time to write in the coming months.
I've already another chapter for this story written out and one for Becoming Harry Potter, as well. The interest in this story seems almost non-existent sadly, so this is mostly written for my own pleasure. Hopefully, some still follow this story and gain some enjoyment from my efforts.
Next update will probably be for Becoming Harry Potter. At some point during the next week. Probably.
What a promise that is.
Thank for reading this far. Goodbye and good day.